If you are interested in contributing or are curious, here’s a starter: https://dev.launchpad.net. It’s the development wiki, feel free to try it out and fix wildly, after all, it’s a wiki for God sake! 😛 More specifically, https://dev.launchpad.net/Getting on how to get Launchpad source, for the “show me the code” people. 😉

Wanting to have a chat with Launchpad developers? Come and join us in #launchpad-dev at Freenode, we’re all friendly. 😉

And also, exactly one year ago I started working at Canonical, and joined Launchpad team as a happy QA Engineer. Quoting my colleague jml:

<jml>Ursinha, time flies when you're having fun :)

Indeed my friend! Indeed.

What a spectacular way to celebrate one year working with this team full of awesomeness. Guys, you all rock, keep up the awesome work!

If blogging was fast like microblogging (as twitter or identi.ca), it would be much easier to keep this blog updated, differently of the rusty dusty state it is now.

Well.

As some of you may know, I’m now working at Canonical – the Ubuntu commercial sponsor -, and I’m really happy and excited about it! I can finally use Ubuntu without my friends bugging me – haha! Just kidding guys. 😉

You may have noticed that I really like Gentoo, but I never hide that I’m indeed a Ubuntu enthusiast, since it brings people together in a huge community, and it’s so beautiful! I can’t let myself not be part of it.

Well, at Canonical I’m a QA Engineer in the Launchpad Releases team.

But what is Launchpad? – you ask me.

Let’s see: I bet you, as a Ubuntu user, found yourself a few times clicking on links Google give you to a bug or answer in Launchpad, regarding your Ubuntu problem/doubt. This often happens because Ubuntu project is hosted in Launchpad.

Launchpad is “a unique collaboration and hosting platform for free software. It brings communities together – regardless of their choice of tools – by making it easy to share code, bug reports, translations and ideas across projects.“, according to Launchpad tour – that I really recommend you to take a look.

In other words, Launchpad is a great environment where you can place your Free Software project and, collaboratively, among your project pals, watch it grow strong.

It gives you plenty of ways of doing that, such as bug tracking, specs tracking – called blueprints -, code hosting (using bazaar), or mirroring, and a lot more.

You can even have your own “Ubuntu repository”, the PPA (Personal Package Archives) – that is one of the features I like the most. Every Launchpad user has one place in Launchpad where he can upload their deb source packages, and then Soyuz – the LP package builder/handler – builds and hosts the debian built package into the user’s PPA. So you can create your own debian package for the free software you’re developing and tell your friends, when they ask you “Oh, how do I install the great software you’re developing at LP?”: just add the PPA line to your sources.list and use apt to install it! This is really awesome.

I’m going to write – soon, I promise! – a post talking more deeply about Launchpad, to try to show the advantages I see when using it.

Last of all, I *must* mention – before someone points me that – that Launchpad is intended to be released as Open Source software. It was already told and I strongly believe so.